


Alive

by tea_leaf_reader



Category: Coco (2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood, Death, I also literally never write angst so...hopefully it's fine, That sweet angst is here y'all
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-28
Updated: 2018-01-28
Packaged: 2019-03-10 11:07:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13500570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tea_leaf_reader/pseuds/tea_leaf_reader
Summary: To be alive, truly alive, in one moment was really all that one could ask for, but that moment of transience would be considered a tragedy when death followed so closely afterwards.





	Alive

To be alive, truly alive, in one moment was really all that one could ask for, but that moment of transience would be considered a tragedy when death followed so closely afterwards.

She was nineteen and the small plaza was splotched with pools of summertime sunshine and she couldn’t have hoped for a more perfect setting as she twirled and twirled and twirled to the lilting crescendo of a vast cacophony of instruments pouring music into the air like each note was for her and her alone.

So she danced, and she didn’t hear the first gunshot, nor the second, but the third made itself known as the bullet ricocheted off of something metallic before it tore into her torso, her ribs splintering apart as she staggered, toppling to the ground, red upon red as welling blood saturated her crimson dress, soaking through.

Her heart was heavy in her chest cavity, a war drum with too slow of a tempo, and she felt it stop with a shuddering jolt before she, too, stopped in a sense.

-

The sparsely decorated office space could only be described as organized chaos with its stacks of documents melding into and intermingling with records and letters and pieces of loose-leaf paper that were perched just so on the edge of a wooden desk that one sigh could send them drifting to the floor with apparent ease. Here she awoke, nothing but bone, sitting in a chair of upholstered velvet.

“I’m sorry to see you here so soon, _cariño_. Tell me, do you have a name?”

The woman is a mother, she can tell by the sympathy that’s shining in her brown eyes as she looks at her behind horn-rimmed glasses, and she swallows unevenly because the presence of  _mother_  is no comfort now, she can find no solace in the fact that this stranger may be the closest thing she’ll have to a mother for a long time to come.

“Socorro Rivera.” She spits the words out like there’d been acid on her tongue.

The receptionist smiles. “Okay. Well, Ms. Rivera, let’s see if we can get you straightened out, shall we?”

-

She was born after the music ban had been lifted, this she knows, so there should be no ill will towards her great-great-grandfather. Still, she finds herself seeing  _him_  at every turn, in his lopsided smile, in his jangling laughter, in the way he seems to disregard personal safety and brush off minor incidents like it’s no big deal, and especially in how he sings and how he plays with the passion of a thousand suns awaking after a period of immense and inscrutable darkness.

“You remind me too much of Miguel sometimes.” She whispers, not meeting his gaze.

The hand on her shoulder is of no surprise, but she shivers at the sudden contact. Everything is too much, too bright, too loud, and too happy for her taste. She wishes to grieve more than anything, properly grieve, and to find that the Land of the Dead is too alive, truly alive, to do that is yet another punch to her metaphorical gut. Pinpricks of tears begin to gather at the corners of her eyes as the man, also taken too young, also frozen in time, enfolds her in his embrace.

And she mourns, and he allows it, and Héctor never thinks less of her for doing so.

-

She’s distant that first Día de los Muertos, a ghost even amongst the ghosts.

The second, she joins the family, but does not join in their festivities.

The third, she dances, and it feels good to be alive again if not truly, if not ever again.

**Author's Note:**

> I've been seeing a lot of AUs and such pop up lately of Miguel dying at a young age and returning to the Land of the Dead, but I thought, well, why not turn up the angst a bit and have his younger sister meet a similar fate while he, in turn, ends up fine? So here is that take on it (written pretty hastily I might add) but I just wanted to get it out here and out of my brain, so enjoy this delicious, delicious angst.


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